In normal times, I guess, Family and friends are just ‘there,’ part of our lives but busy with their own circumstances too. It’s when crises arise that our support network coalesces and keeps us going.

I have been the focus of a crisis or two, as it happens, when my beloved might have collapsed under the strain of managing and caring for me, had it not been for that support. Personally, I’ve felt that I could easily slip into a hermitage, a kind of solitary existence, even though I can be quite a social animal when I’m amenable. But I have not, yet, found that I myself have needed the sort of support that could sustain when an ongoing crisis is focused on someone else. I think that I’ve tried to be supportive when a situation in someone else’s family has arisen; one feels that one should, or could always do more. But I haven’t really felt that such a need has been asked of me, not in the long-term. As many British writers in the 1930s felt, I have not experienced a great test in that context.

So it’s only vicariously that I can think of how encompassing and humanising this system of family and friends actually is. That doesn’t mean, I hope, that I daren’t explore the ramifications of that comfort; inevitably, my turn to experience this human capacity will arise. And that said, on reflection I can’t help but recall the compassion shown by my extended family on the occasion of the evening supper after my father’s funeral, and the spontaneous outpouring of ‘Amazing Grace’ at my mother’s graveside. Though these salutary moments helped me and my brothers through, they are not the sort of extended, long-term support a debilitating illness, for example, might elicit. It’s that Encompassing Comfort that I’m trying to describe here.

I’m exploring a set of circumstances in my emerging novel, a romantic historical fiction, in which the protagonists are separated from family by events just beyond their control. Nevertheless, as I develop the last third of the book, somehow I’m finding that family manage to interpolate themselves into the sphere of the principals, for whom I’m seeking redemption after catharsis. Of course: what novel would be complete without some sort of salvation, self-realisation, understanding?

So this piece today is a kind of paean to family and friends, without whom we are so poor as to scarcely exist on a human level, though we may trudge along in an existential way. They are like an ark that carries us through troubled waters, to land on some promised mountain-top that cannot even be imagined during the flood. This social network, bound by ties of genetics and social constructs, is what keeps us human, after all, and as I developed in a poem recently, ‘They sing of life exalted.’

Would that I too will be able to join that wave of humanity in support of a desperate soul, when the time comes.